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Tree
Trees are planted objects which produce fruit. At the time of this writing (November 2017) there are ten species of trees: Acquisition Trees may be purchased from the Store or gifted by neighbors. Because it can take almost a month to recover the purchase price, most players do not purchase their trees. Unless you have no neighbors, don't buy a tree: wait to get it as a gift. Planting and harvesting Any tree, regardless of species, occupies an area equivalent to one quarter of a planting square (1/2 x 1/2 square). However, there is a restriction on how close together trees can be planted. The minimum spacing from tree to tree is 1.5 times the width of a planting square. In other words, one planting square will fit exactly between two trees planted at minimum spacing. To harvest or move a tree, click the base of its trunk (its planting plot, as with anything else). Some of the fruit can be used for jam, some for pies, if you have the right equipment and other prerequisites. Strategies Aside from simply making the farm more attractive, trees can be a useful part of any CountryLife farm. They have long growing times, which means they do not require frequent attention. Unlike field crops, trees do not have to be replanted when the fruit is harvested, so they have no recurring seed cost. They have two disadvantages, however. First, there are no XP for harvesting a tree, so they don't help the player advance through levels. Second, and more significantly, their profitability relative to other crops depends strongly on how efficiently you use the area around them. Because they do not have the same footprint as other crops, you cannot plant trees in a layout that does not have some wasted space. If you allow each tree to take up a whole square, you will find that a tree is not as profitable, per unit area, as other crops that you could plant in that square. For example, an Apple Tree can give you a profit of 15 coins every 16 hours (12 hours if you have a Greenhouse or each time you buy some rain), if you are around to harvest it then, but if the same square were used for clover and harvested as often as possible in that period, you would realize a profit of 20 coins if you sold the clover. Furthermore, you could realize a profit of 40 coins if you fed the clover to your Holstein Cow and sold the milk and even more if you made it into cheese or used it in bread. Once you have a Jam'r, the fruit from Apple, Cherry and Orange trees can be processed into jam for more profit. This is a good way to make use of honey. It does require extra effort to pollinate clover and collect the jars of honey for making jam, but the honey is pure profit. There is no processing for bananas; the only thing you can do (at the time of writing) is sell the fruit. When trees were first introduced in CountryLife, there was no restriction on their spacing; they could be placed half a square apart. A few players were able to take advantage of that and create layouts that had many trees planted in a small area. That caused a very unrealistic appearance. The developers soon added the spacing restriction described above. A few layouts created before the restriction was imposed still exist, so you might, when visiting a neighbor's farm, see a planting of trees that you cannot reproduce. Efficient layouts using trees Because of the restriction on the spacing between trees, players who wish to maximize their profit must find a way to efficiently use the space between them. Part of the solution is to place trees between machines, animals and buildings. Many players create layouts with trees in front of and between machines and animals for the "screening" effect; the trees hide the pens and machines that could be considered unsightly, giving a more natural appearance to the landscape. Apart from that, you intersperse trees and planting squares. This can give a very profitable farm, since trees yield fruit over and over with no seed costs (assuming the trees have been gifted to you) and they occupy very little area (assuming you use a layout with minimal wasted space). Here are two layouts which allow trees to be planted at the minimum spacing in both directions, giving maximum tree density. In the first one, a row-oriented grid is used, which is more convenient for planting and harvesting, but there is a wasted 1/2 square of area between each pair of trees, which results in only 89% of the area being used for production. In the second layout, a "basketweave" pattern is used; there is no wasted space, so 100% of the area can be used for production, minus a very small fraction at the extreme edges of the planting area. It is a bit more cumbersome for planting and harvesting, however. TreesDetail2_578x386.png|Row-oriented layout with maximum tree density. TreesDetail1_578x386.png|Row-oriented layout with maximum tree density. Profitability A ranch which combines trees with other crops can be more profitable than one which only grows field crops. The most profitable product that can currently be produced in CountryLife is bread, so we will compare the profitability of two ranches with identical growing area that both produce bread: one which has trees and one which does not. We will assume that both ranches have a 20 x 20 plantable area. We will also assume that the animals, machines, buildings, and beehives are all placed outside that area. In the first case, the entire 20 x 20 area is laid out with 400 squares for growing field crops. To produce bread, one third of the squares will be devoted to growing wheat and the other two thirds will be growing alternating crops of clover and corn. In a 24-hour period, the ranch can produce two crops of wheat and one crop each of clover and corn. That adds up to 266 wheat, 267 corn, 267 clover and a by-product of 267 jars of honey . If we process those crops into flour, eggs and milk and then bake bread, we get 266 loaves of bread, which can be sold for a net profit of 46,550 (after seed costs). In addition, the 267 jars of honey can be sold for a profit of 1,335. So, the ranch can generate a total profit of 47,885 per day. In the second case, the 20 x 20 area is laid out using the optimal tree planting scheme shown above, which gives approximately 350 squares for growing field crops and 200 trees. As before, one third of the squares will be devoted to growing wheat and the other two thirds will be growing alternating crops of clover and corn . In a 24-hour period, the ranch can produce two crops of wheat and one crop each of clover and corn. In this case, the ranch produces 234 wheat, 234 corn, 234 clover and 234 jars of honey plus 200 oranges. If we process those crops into flour, eggs and milk and then bake bread, we get 234 loaves of bread, which can be sold for a net profit of 40,600 (after seed costs). In addition, the honey and oranges can be used to make 200 jars of orange jam which can be sold for a net profit of 11,400 and there will still be 34 jars of honey left over which can be sold for a profit of 170. This ranch can generate a total profit of 52,170 per day. This demonstrates that a ranch which mixes trees with field crops can be 12% more profitable than one which grows field crops alone, provided that the most efficient layout scheme is used. Category:CountryLife trees Category:Game strategies